Cheever's ever-popular, many-faceted short story, “The Swimmer,” accommodates various readings, particular and universal. Within its range of appeal, for instance, it has been read as suggestive autobiography,¹ contemporary American Odyssey (Hunt 280-83), dazzling literary structure (Kruse 221), as a “midsummer's nightmare” (Bell 433), sacramental parody (Blythe and Sweet 393), realism yielding to fantasy (Blythe and Sweet 415) and Neddy Merrill dead in Hades (Cervo 49-50). I propose that the story, along with its literal and figural resonances, has the suggestive depth of a spiritual allegory in the fashion of Dante, whom Cheever admired, and whose influence he acknowledged affectionately.² As a terse and grim Commedia, “The Swimmer” evinces a pattern of meaning that enlarges the story's autobiographical and epic mythoi to include an account of how Neddy Merrill's sad swim in his superbly affluent neighborhood reveals itself as an uneasy pilgrimage in hell, owing much in subject and structure to Dante's Inferno, which Cheever early in his career began reading quite routinely.³

Cheever, very possibly, was mindful of how his story's central metaphor reiterates a dramatic image pivotally located at the outset of the Inferno. The lost poet, trying to escape from the dark woods of sin, struggles to free himself from the worldly realm of evil to which he must ultimately return, and at a deeper level, pass through:

And as a swimmer, panting, from the main
Heaves safe to shore, then turns to face the drive
Of perilous seas, and looks, and looks again,
So, while my soul yet fled, did I contrive
To turn and gaze on that dread pass once more
Whence no man yet came ever out alive (Dante 72)

The spiritual exhaustion of Dante's spent swimmer, in the throes of earth bound affliction, represents the condition to which Neddy Merrill arrives at the close of “The Swimmer.” What brings Neddy to that state is what Dante the pilgrim witnesses in his mystical journey through hell: subjection to secular infirmity in its repulsive, final formulation as deadly sin but parading, in Cheever's gloss, as bourgeois banality. Neddy, unlike Dante the pilgrim, is not exempted from such banality and proves ignorant of what lies behind it—as is also the case with his neighbors—a point that Cheever makes skillfully throughout his entire story and most poignantly, in Neddy's case, at its ending.

At the outset of his spiritual allegory, Cheever represents a world entirely given over to surfeit: “everyone … the parishioners leaving church … the priest himself … the leader of the Audubon group …” (603) are all afflicted with excess, symbolized by drinking too much. Since Judeo-Christian man by definition is a sinner, his only resource is to shed his infirmities as he moves forth on the way to salvation, the ars moriendi revivified in homiletic literature since Everyman. But Neddy's soul trek will be far less sobering. Accordingly, and with the prospect of enjoying his day, Neddy, as he sets about planning his swim “home” by means of the “river” formed by a succession of neighborhood pools, high heartedly has “the feeling that he was a pilgrim” in addition to being an “explorer” (604).

The day chosen for the swim, “one of those mid Summer Sundays” (603), clearly evokes Dante's pilgrimage, opening “midway in life's journey” (I.1) the starting point of the Inferno. In fact, this, Cheever's opening sentence, echoes Dante's opening line. The ingenious image of interconnecting pools that constitute a “quasi subterranean stream” (603) certainly recalls the continuum of waterways and lakes that form the great “river” of life (II.107) that Vergil and Dante follow in hell. Possibly, we might add, Neddy's “Lucinda River” (604), named after his wife, harkens back to St. Lucia, Dante's patron saint, who prompts Beatrice in the Inferno to keep Dante safe on this “river” of life (II.103 08). Neddy's “river,” like virtually everything else around him, however, is not what it appears to be. The river is interrupted, painfuly for Neddy—by hot pavement, cutting gravel,”treacherous” “footing” (608), among other physical discomforts—reminding the reader of the afflicted earth of well-heeled but deeply hurting Suburbia turned Superbia. The Bunkers' pool, built “on a rise” (605), reflects such presumptuous affluence, as do, earlier, the complaining party people at the Westerhazy pool, and the affluent community at large, who by their tiresome vainglory, reduce their previous night's gluttonous boozings to languid complaints about Sunday hangovers. Given over to such callow pride of life, Neddy, pumped up by his imaginative plan to swim home, envisions himself “a legendary figure,” and thus proudly dives into the “river,” only to experience a feeling of unfocused arrogance, which Cheever, with perfect bathos, renders as “an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools” (604). So much for the irascible passions of pride in the dim-souled digs of Bullet Park.

Soon, at the Bunkers', although he hears ominous, distant “thunder” (606)—perhaps an echo of the “heavy peal of thunder” that heralds Dante's entrance to the pit of hell (IV.1-6)—Neddy, like Dante, as if in dream, becomes, curiously, even more detached from the scene that threatens to engulf him. While at the Bunkers' he surveys many “prosperous men and women gathered … while caterer's men in white coats passed them cold gin” (605). Cheever describes here an envy that Neddy disguises as wistfulness: “Ned felt a passing affection for the scene, a disengaging tenderness for the gathering, as if it was something he might touch” (605). But as Neddy becomes recognized by all, and the gathering, although we don't know exactly why as yet, overzealously threatens to “surround” him, he rushes back into his river, anxious to resume “his voyage” (605). Curiously, Cheever has made Neddy—along with his reader—distant observers of the very action that subsumes him, in the fashion of Dante's narrator, who, seemingly engulfed by hell, remains safely disengaged from it. The chief difference, however, lies in that Dante's narrator and reader are instructed, and ironically edified, by the tormented souls in hell. But Cheever's “pilgrim” and afflicted suburbanites must remain in the dark—Neddy to his suffering, they to their own afflictions.

We might, then, wonder where in this world stands Cheever's reader, who knows virtually nothing of the main character, who himself knows little among people who speak negligibly, if at all, of him and themselves. As for Neddy's neighbors, saturated in various solutions of pride and envy, Cheever's vapid bourgeoisie share little more than their over-ready self-indulgence, torpid will, and self-preening respectability. Neddy, in this dismal state, despite his physical vitality, can remain just as “pleased” (606) drinking and swimming in the pool at the vacated Levy premises as he had been before at pools busy with such people, whose fellowship he, like the others, doesn't truly need but whose drinks he customarily relishes. The storm that finally arrives and confines Neddy to the Levys' gazebo brings with it a hint of autumn and death, as “red and yellow leaves” become scattered on the lawn. In the Inferno, storming rains signify gluttony, which, as the nearly prevailing affliction of Bullet Park, represents not merely overindulging in alcohol—Neddy, indeed, does “love storms” (606)—but also embracing such perversions of the tongue as idle, indifferent, or malicious speech. Enid Bunker, for instance, surprised by Neddy's visit, inanely screams to her guests, “Oh look who's here! What a marvelous surprise! When Lucinda said that you couldn't come I thought I'd die!” Neddy, comparably, when he speaks, has little of substance to say to anyone. Neddy, well supplied with either drink or watery words, by others or himself, continues his chlorinated, alcoholic pilgrimage, arriving at the Levys’. From that point on, Neddy will no longer be tendered an offhanded word or drink, although he has yet a good way to go on his “trip.” The Lindleys' overgrown, dismantled riding ring recalls the jousting ring in Dante's fourth circle of avarice where hoarders and spendthrifts bump against each other (VII. 28-36).

Such circular movements about, or variations between, avarice and prodigality, what Dante calls “Fortune”—because the riding ring is of no use—now no longer exist for the indigent Neddy, a truly ominous secular note. Fortune's wheel, in effect, has no turns left for Neddy. His worldly decline, further symbolized by the Welchers' drained pool, recalls the movement downward to what eventually becomes the “vile broth” of the Styx marsh in Dante's circle of discontent (VII.118). Cheever represents Dante's “ghastly pool” (VII.127) as the putrid public swimming pool. At the Lancaster Recreation Center no re-creation or redemptive moment awaits Neddy, who finds himself in turbulent “murk” (608), which threatens to engulf him with its human chaos. He gets by, having “reminded himself that he was an explorer, a pilgrim, and that this was merely a stagnant bend in the Lucinda River” (608). Subsequently, just as Dante's pilgrim eyes “those who gulp the marish foul” and reaches “at length the foot of a tall tower” with twin beacons (VII. 129-30), Neddy realizes “that he might contaminate himself” but swims ahead anyway only to find himself, a trespasser, detected by a “pair of lifeguards in a pair of towers” (608).

Neddy, like Dante in being unwelcome, is now entering the outer environs of the city of Dis, the dark and increasingly cold realm of hell (because most removed from the warmth of divine grace found in Heaven). Dante's twin towers, like Cheever's two lifeguards, are sentinels who seek to detect and repel intruders. To say the least, Dis proves disappointing. The unfiltered waters of the Halloran estate, and its “enormous wealth,” are impure (608). A venerable sort of Adam and Eve, now sitting “naked” in their “blighted” paradise, they deeply sadden Neddy (608). The old lady talks of his “sold house” and “poor children” (609) until Neddy, interrupting her, withdraws despondently. The Hallorans, quite like the inhabitants of Dante's fifth circle, are the inwardly mournful—the sullen, who, as Dante describes them, also appear “naked, with looks of savage discontent” (VII. 111). Her “voice filled the air with an unseasonable melancholy …” and Neddy “was cold and he was tired and the naked Hallorans and their dark water had depressed him” (609). His impressions intensify at the Halloran daughter's house, where he finds Helen and Eric with no drinks and Eric post-operatively with no navel—seemingly, with “no link to birth, this breach in the succession …” (610), a parody, appropriately, of his wife's, and mankind's, now Dis-connected, saturnine progenitors. Swimming in their “cold water and, gasping, close to drowning,” Neddy perversely promises that Lucinda and he “terribly” (610) want to see them, echoing Mrs. Halloran's being “terribly” sorry for Neddy (609).⁴ Terror, longing, and sorrow here blend effectively in this grim realm, where Neddy is brought down more, re-experiencing the unfortunate fall with Adam, Eve, and their sad progeny in the modern paradise of Bullet Park.

Continuing further into the dour realm of Dis, Neddy crosses “some fields” (610)—Dante, a valley—where he approaches the Biswanger estate, where an “enormous do” (610) is taking place. The throng gathered there, like the congregation of Dis, is “noisy and large” (IX. 64-72). This place is the nether land of the violently wrathful, as symbolized by Grace Biswanger, who approaches him “bellicosely” (610). She refers to Neddy as a “gate crasher” (610), evoking the image of the “gates of Dis,” through which Dante and Vergil are temporarily prevented from entering (VIII. 115-17). Presiding at Dante's Gate of Dis is Medusa, whom the poet's eyes scrupulously avoid. On the other hand, when Cheever's ungracious hostess accosts Neddy, he “did not flinch”: “As a gate crasher,” he asked politely, and with pathetic self-irony, “do I rate a drink?” (610) Turning her back to Neddy, she tells him to suit himself but then defames him before her guests: the demythologized contemporary equivalent of being turned into stone, Cheever comically suggests.

At this point in the Inferno Dante has Cavalcante de Cavalcanti—the father of Dante's closest friend, the poet Guido de Cavalcanti, like Dante, also esteemed highly by Cheever⁵—explain that all souls in hell are oblivious to the present and that they can but barely make out things distant—that is, from either the past or the future:

“We see,” said he, “like men who are dim of
sight,
Things that are distant from us; just so far
We still have gleams of the All-Guider's light.
But when these things draw near, or when they are,
Our intellect is void, and your world's state
Unknown, save some one bring us news from there.
Hence thou wilt see that all we can await
Is the stark death of knowledge in us, then
When time's last hour shall shut the future's gate.”
(X. 100-08)

This passage throws light upon the condition of Neddy, whose amnesia is neither psychological nor provisional, but, in the context of Cheever's Dantesque tale, profoundly spiritual and enduring. Neddy's “pilgrimage,” although ostensibly directed towards “home,” is actually oriented vaguely toward the “west,” where, as he reports, “there was a massive stand of cumulus clouds so like a city seen from a distance” (603). This infirm city, introduced early on in the story, contrasts, of course, with the proverbial city of God that has a “fixed foundation” (Hebrews 11:10). This “city,” which Neddy eventually experiences as a drenching cold storm, is allegorically Dis—his spiritual oblivion—which accentuates all the more his inability to know his past, future, and present. Neddy's ignorance renders him oblivious to the depths of his soul's degradation as much as it helps to explain Cheever's unusual narrative technique, which obscures as much as it reveals. Neither Neddy nor his neighbors are even faintly aware of their constrictions. This habit of artfully enclosing layers of thematic significance well within his narrative scheme was at the core of Cheever's idea of good writing:

I once got a phone call from a student. He said, “I'm having an argument about your short story, “The Swimmer,” with my instructor. I've got him right here, and you can settle it.” I told the kid that it seemed to me that a writer has a story to tell and should be granted a certain amount of innocence. Any story that is told is stratified and has all kinds of profundities if it's any good at all. It's like saying “good morning.” You can imply anything: I love you. You look awful. Drop dead. I can't live without you. And so forth. It's all in a very simple salutation. And this seems to me to be the privilege of the novelist. (Conversations 40)

Cheever, fully privileged and insightfully so, very cleverly shows us how Neddy's neighbors, in seeming to know more about Neddy's condition than he, are, in fact, like him, unaware of the dire limits of their mortality—and morality. They share with Neddy their impoverished self knowledge and deprived awareness of what lies about them.

Having little perspective on Grace Biswanger's malevolence—typically underestimating, even slighting, sin, Neddy understands her bitter hatred as being “worse than eating your peas off a knife” (611). Consequently, Neddy seeks consolation, again misguidedly, in “sexual roughhouse” with his “old mistress, Shirley Adams” (611). Remaining unfocused, of course, Neddy cannot recall whether they “had an affair last week, last month, last year” (611). His sense of the future is likewise dim: he believes that their anticipated lovemaking will indeed bring back “the joy of life in his heart” (611). Without any clear idea of past and future, like de Cavalcanti and all sinners, he is oblivious to the present. Although their relationship had ended, at his initiative, he believes that his claim upon her has “an authority unknown to holy matrimony,” and he is surprised to find her “confused to see him” (611). Neddy, however, has none of de Cavalcanti's suffering insight.

Dante reserves nether hell—with its last three circles and two rivers, Phlegethon and Cocytus—for those sinners who have committed various forms of fraud, from simple to complex. Neddy's affinity, unknown to him, of course, lies with those whose breaches of trust are complex: cheats and thieves are included among this group. Relatedly, Neddy's deception has been against his wife and against his mistress, from whom, we learn, he has obtained money injuriously. Cheever provides dialogue that is half stychomythia:

“What do you want?” she said.

“I'm swimming across the country.”

“Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?”

“What's the matter?”

“If you've come here for money,” she said, “I won't give you another cent.”

“You could give me a drink.”

“I could but I won't. I'm not alone.”

“Well, I'm on my way.” (611)

The curt give and take here, by its diminished form, suggests all in the way of human connectedness, feebly wrought and worded as it may be, that Neddy can summon with another soul. We now know how truly alone Neddy, so completely from himself, has become.

The final circle of Dante's Inferno holds the souls of the betrayers, great and small. It is a dark, cold, even icy realm, which holds the souls of men, who like all the damned of hell, have no hope of salvation. As such, it represents the perfection of sin—accidia or despair—the sin of spiritual sloth. The condemned souls, locked in the icy waters of the Cocytus—“their teeth chattering like storks”—are filled with convulsions of remorse yielding icy tears and “helpless fury” (XXII. 35-36, 51). Neddy, similarly, finds himself now in a state of confused grief: “It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever cried, certainly the first time in his life that he had ever felt so miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered” (611-12). Exhausted from his long immersions, and tortured now by the “icy water” of the Gilmartins' and the Clydes' pools, Neddy can barely make it to his house's driveway. Just as Dante with Vergil enter the final realm of Dis, which Dante, horrified, makes out to be “a shadowy mass,” Vergil stands aside, revealing Satan as not a being, but as “the place where thou must steel thy soul with constancy” (XXIV. 7, 21). Dante's final impression is suggestive:

How cold I grew, how faint with fearfulness,
Ask me not, Reader, I shall not waste breath
Telling what words are powerless to express;
This was not life, and yet, twas not death;
If thou hast wit to think how I might fare
Bereft of both, let fancy aid thy faith. (XXIV. 22-27)

Neddy, cold and faint, finds his wife and his daughters gone, “the place empty”—his world lost. Neither alive nor dead, Neddy leaves us in his suburban void. The region of damnable betrayal in Dante has been transformed into the realm of superbly ignorant self-betrayal, which Cheever portrays as subsuming everyman thrashing about in the oblivion of his nowadays.

Notes

1. Speaking of Cheever's completion of the story and his own powerful reaction to it, Scott Donaldson observes, “Then he started to narrow it down ‘and something began happening. It was growing cold and quiet. It was turning into winter. Involuntarily. It was a terrible experience writing that story.’ He was proud of having written it, but it left him … feeling dark and cold himself. It was the last story he wrote for a long time” (Donaldson 212).

2. In Conversations with John Cheever, Cheever reflected, “My critical grasp of literature is largely at a practical level. I use what I love, and this can be anything. Cavalcanti, Dante, Frost, anybody” (98).

3. In The Letters of John Cheever, the author recalls “At night I read the Divine Comedy and the speeches of Franklin Roosevelt” (122). One study draws attention to the Inferno reference in “Summer Theatre”—“you all look like something out of Dante”—suggesting at what imaginative depth Cheever wrote very early in his career (Fogelman 463).

4. Cheever's italicizing terribly is particularly interesting in view of his account of how he felt after he wrote “The Swimmer” in observing that writing the story “was a terrible experience …” (Conversations 136).

5. Cavalcanti's name quickly came to mind for Cheever (Conversations 98).

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy: Hell. Tr. Dorothy Leigh Sayers Baltimore: Penguin, 1949.

Bell, Loren C. “‘The Swimmer’: A Midsummer's Nightmare.” Studies in Short Fiction 24 (1987): 433-36.

Blythe, Hal, and Charlie Sweet. “Man Made vs. Natural Cycles: What Really Happens in ‘The Swimmer.’” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (1990): 415-18.

“Perverted Sacraments in John Cheever's ‘The Swimmer.’” Studies in Short Fiction 21 (1984): 393-94.

Cervo, Nathan. “Cheever's The Swimmer.” The Explicator 50 (1991): 49-50.

Cheever, John Conversations with John Cheever. Ed. Scott Donaldson Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1987.

The Letters of John Cheever. Ed. Benjamin Cheever. New York: Simon, 1988.

“The Swimmer.” The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. 603-12.

Cheever, Susan. Home Before Dark. Boston: Houghton, 1984.

Coale, Samuel. John Cheever. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977.

Donaldson, Scott. John Cheever. New York: Random, 1988.

Fogelman, Bruce. “A Key Pattern of Imagery in Cheever's Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989): 463-72.

Hunt, George W. John Cheever: The Hobgoblin Company of Love. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1983.

Kruse, Horst. “Parsing a Complex Structure: Literary Allusion and Mythic Evocation in John Cheever's Short Story ‘The Swimmer.’” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 20 (1987): 217-31.

O’Hara, James E. John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Hall, 1989.

Slabey, Robert M. “John Cheever: The ‘Swimming’ of America.” Critical Essays on John Cheever. Ed. Robert G. Collins. Boston: Hall, 1982. 180-90.